“I’m not ruling anything out,” Wurzelbacher told The Ticket in an interview Thursday. He added that he thought it was an “interesting idea” and that people have been asking him to run for office since he confronted Obama four years ago. He’s spent much of his time since then on the speaker’s circuit, he said, encouraging others to run for office.

“I like the idea of it — just regular Americans running. If a regular guy runs, right away the media’s going to attack him,” Wurzelbacher said. “What kind of education does he have? What does he know about this? My answer to that is, regular Americans aren’t experts, but dammit, look where the experts have gotten us. Maybe we need some regular guys in there. That’s what I’ve been doing the past two and a half years, just encouraging regular Americans to run. Tell the liberal media to go to hell and I don’t care what you guys say about me, I’m going to try to fix this country.”

Man, I hate it when people condescend to regular Americans! Especially when people like Joe the Plumber condescend to “regular Americans.” Regular Americans don’t have publicity agents, Joe!

The local Republican Party is begging Mr. The Plumber to enter the race, because while running against a 30-year veteran is usually a pointless task, a pseudo-celebrity candidate can at least make a game of it. Kaptur won with 60 percent of the vote in 2010 and 74 percent in 2008, though there’s a chance redistricting could make her vulnerable. (Kaptur also introduced a bill restoring Glass-Steagall! So basically I like her.)

Local Republicans say there’s about a 90 percent chance Joe will enter the race, at which point once again he will be asked questions on camera and he will say embarrassing things, like he did last time.

But as dumb and small-minded and tiresome as Joe the Plumber is, there’s no reason why he couldn’t be a congressman. Ben Quayle is!

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page takes a break from excusing the criminality of the executives in charge of its parent company to deliver an official house reaction to the developments in Tripoli that starts off cautious and then just descends right back into the exact same lame arguments it’s been using for the last six months:

Having helped to midwife the rebel advances with air power, intelligence and weapons, NATO will have some influence with the rebels in the days ahead. The shame is how much faster Gadhafi might have been defeated, how many fewer people might have been killed, and how much more influence the U.S. might now have, if America had led more forcefully from the beginning.

Planning for this moment is precisely why we and many others had urged the State Department to engage with the rebels from the earliest days of the revolt, but the U.S. was slow to do so and only formally recognized the opposition Transitional National Council in mid-July. The hesitation gave Gadhafi hope that he could hold out and force a stalemate.

Libyans will determine their own future, but the U.S. has a stake in showing the world that NATO’s intervention, however belated and ill-executed, succeeded in its goals of removing a dictator, saving lives, and promoting a new Libyan government that respects its people and doesn’t sponsor global terrorism.

I’m not sure how long the editors of the Wall Street Journal think your average revolution lasts, but assuming Gadhafi’s hold on power is as weak as it appears today, I would argue — as a layman, of course — that NATO’s intervention seems neither “belated” nor “ill-executed.” (I mean, it seems well-executed, in the sense that it seems to have accomplished its goal?)

But it’s the line about America leading “more forcefully from the beginning” that the neocons and GOP hawks will continue to cling to no matter what actually happens in Libya. It’s the same argument BFF Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham used in their joint response to this weekend’s developments: “Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.”

All-out war! From day one! With the full force of American airpower! One definite way to make a civil war faster and less bloody is for a foreign country to enter it fully, right? (It tends to unite the populace, for one thing!) And conflicts are always less bloody when America drops more American bombs. That’s how we won Vietnam!

There’s no point in countering McCain and the Journal’s arguments with reason, of course, because these are not actually fact-based responses to news, they’re just rote recitations of Republican dogma: Obama weak! (Except domestically, where he is an autocrat.)

And this is the “respectable” Republican talking point. The line from the real nuts — I’m guessing something along the lines of “radical Obama allows Muslim Brotherhood to seize control in Libya” — will begin bubbling up from the sewers to talk radio and Fox News and Michele Bachmann’s campaign soon enough.

“I believe that the planned drawdown is an unnecessary risk,” McCain, a Republican from Arizona, who claimed that no military leader has spoken in favor of the timetable.

Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine general expected to carry out the president’s drawdown order, has said the schedule is a bit more aggressive than the military had anticipated. Allen has cautioned that successfully winding down the war will require new progress on a wide front, including more help from allies and less Afghan corruption.

McCain — during a stop at the Kabul headquarters of the foreign military contingent, called the International Security Assistance Force — said he’s concerned there may not be enough American troops for a move from southern Afghanistan to the east to “finish the job there.” There are currently about 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan among a total international force of more than 132,000.

NATO has deployed the bulk of its forces to Helmand and Kandahar, two southern provinces where Afghan Taliban influence is strong, but international terrorist groups are less influential.

McCain said the drawdown will deprive NATO “to a significant degree” as it attempts to pacify eastern Afghanistan next summer.

Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, cited gains in Afghan security force recruitment and capability and said he was optimistic that native forces would soon be ready to take over security. But Graham also worried Obama’s withdrawal plan may reduce U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan too quickly.

“Withdrawal is what the enemy hopes to hear,” said Graham. “Our goal is to make sure that the enemy doesn’t hear withdrawal and the Afghan people don’t hear withdrawal.”

Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said it was important to reassure Afghans that they will continue to receive help long after the 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops.

“We’re certainly going to be here in great numbers until the end of 2014 and I hope as a result of a strategic long-term partnership with Afghanistan that we will have a military presence here and cooperation here with our Afghan partners for a long time after that,” said Lieberman.

The senators were skeptical about Western efforts to reach a negotiated peace with the Taliban’s leadership and suggested that political compromises with the insurgents could betray the Afghan people.

“I don’t think there will be serious negotiations with the Taliban until they are convinced that they cannot succeed in the attaining their goals through the force of arms on the battlefield,” said McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential race.

Lieberman said that the Taliban would not seriously consider peace until coalition and Afghan forces “basically beat down and wear down the Taliban fighters and they lose their will increasingly and the leadership is isolated.” Lieberman called the idea that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, NATO leaders and insurgent commanders could talk out their differences at a peace conference “a dream, a fantasy.”

The senators’ harshest observations were reserved for Pakistan, home of many of the insurgent groups NATO forces are currently fighting in Afghanistan.

“There’s growing anger, it’s not just impatience, in the Congress of the United States toward Pakistan,” said Lieberman. “We want to have a good relationship with them but we’re tired of seeing them be both our allies and our enemies and supporting our enemies at the same time. They’ve got to decide to be our allies and we’ll be good allies to them, or we won’t.”

Shortly before the senators’ news conference in Kabul, an improvised bomb exploded on the other end of the capital, wounding three Afghan policemen, the Afghan Interior Ministry said. Insurgents have focused many of their attacks on Afghan security forces to undermine their development and NATO’s plans to transfer security operations to Afghan control.

As Salon’s Justin Elliott has pointed out, McCain’s “substantial evidence” has been hard to confirm — and last night, Jon Stewart tried to clear things up by interviewing the politician’s cranky puppet counterpart.

See the full clip here: